Gave it the ol' college try and it was a lot easier than I thought it would be. This week's map is so much easier than last week's, probably because you can split the enemy's army instead of all of them funneling into the same general area on the map and just swarming you if you don't capture the forts as soon as your approach them.

Also cleared the BHB without much issue, but the banner along with it wasn't as nice and gave me a 3* Gordin.

First off, grats on your 3k post man (I wonder what percentage of them have been in this thread alone?).

And second, is that I'm now up to 4.75% pity and climbing on this stupid Awakening banner and it fucking sucks because we've got another Spring seasonal and a Legendary coming up and I was hoping to score a Fire Ephraim out of the deal, and I'm still spent on Orbs and running out of sources for more (I may just have to give up on pulling non-seaonals/Legendaries altogether; but still, I'll take the goddamn pity breaker, even if its another -Atk Cain or some horse shit).

And speaking of Orbs lying around, after two Stamina Drinks, I got bored and cheesed the hell out of the BHeB with Klein, Axura, Danceliva, and Bowlyn (I wouldn't have resorted to such drastic means if it hadn't been for the concurrent T_T, since I'd rather be spending my Stamina there instead).

Also 30 hours is too short for a jrpg imo. I hope that was just people rushing through it.

From what I've been hearing, those times are indeed coming from not putting up with Level 5's bullshit grind.

That said, of the three main timewasters, the two biggest are pretty much lifted straight from Suikoden with a kingdom building sim and Pikmin battles (which sound like they're as meh as anything tactical that Suikoden did, if not even less interesting), while the third sounds like DQIX's Grottoes again.

That said, I wouldn't dive right in quite yet because it seems that Level 5's tendency of including everything down to the kitchen sink is alive and well here, so who knows how deep the grinding rabbit hole really goes or how far can you progress before the microtransactions start rearing its ugly head.

At the very least, it sounds like the Poke/Digi/Whatever-mon mechanics that they had in NNK1 was ditched, and the basic gameplay has been improved over NNK1's (not that 'herding suicidal AI' was a high bar to clear).

The tl;dr is that Level 5 learned something from the trainwreck that was NNK1, but its still too soon to say whether or not this one can jell into a cohesive game or end up buried beneath yet another forgettable pile of Level 5's grinding excrement.

Rean is a mixed bag for me. I like that he's a protagonist who actually acts like a leader. In most JRPGs the protagonist is the group leader because people look at him, recognise that he is the protagonist, and humbly bow before his glory. Rean at least starts taking charge, tries to problem solve, and generally maintains order within the group. His social standing also puts him in a good spot to mediate for everyone. His rise to the central figure of Class VII feels, to me, earned. On the other hand... (CS1 spoilers)

He's a super saiyan with a giant robot who constantly has girls (including his own adopted sister) fawning over him, but he's too dense to notice.

I don't dislike Rean at all. Despite all the shonen-boy traits, they do enough with him to make him feel like his own character. Yet I feel I would like him better if they did a little more with (or used a few less of) the generic anime tropes.

Also, call me a hipster, but I actually find the 3D style they went with charming. When I turned the voices off because I didn't enjoy the dub, I discovered that it makes little beep sounds as text scrolls, akin to Dragon Quest. That feature, coupled with the visuals, made me feel very much like I was playing a PS2 game, but rather than find it dated, I found it extremely charming. Even now that I could theoretically grab the Japanese voices, just hearing voiced lines is so wrong to me. Sure the animations are rough (Cold Steel 2 touched them up a bit), but all-in-all I feel the PS2-era visuals have as much a charm to them as the older ones, albeit in a different way.

I loved the dub and this its a lot better than the Japanese voices. It also helped that the VAs had an excellent translation to work with.

Other than the dungeons the graphics and art are excellent.

I imagine its hard to do a 3rd person protag, have some sembelance of player choice and they pulled it off w/ Rean. Maybe he doesn't have much any depth as a character but he's likable, mostly free of angst and/or raeg and comes off as a capable leader and a kid who realistically discovers what he really wants to be in life in his teen years.

And OK its a bit harem-y but the game wants you to choose a gf. so yea you are probably going to have to write the story so that every girl has some feeling for him to make any kind of relationship believable (or do the harvest moon thing, where the girl only likes you if you buy them things) Also at the very least the game doesn't let you stick Rean's tougue down Fie or Millium's throat.

His bland "leader" speeches before bosses are kind of a self-aware in game joke and it works IMO. If he ever said anything of substance in them I think I might be disapointed.

I wouldn't mind them using the Echoes battle system or at least nerf the power that some weapons have over other players (that's a nice 18th level pegasus knight you have, I hope you don't mind me sending it to heaven with one arrow). Also feel free to ripoff Banner Saga's 1-3 battle penalty for your player getting axed or severely wounded.

If anything the White Knight Chronicles were the real Dark Cloud 3 with its evil circus opening, over-dependence on the broke ass MMO (and that was before its doors were shuttered), useless females (to the point of knee capping your own custom avatar just in case you decided to play a female), a plot more nonsensical than FE Fates' three game clusterfuck, and paid DLC to change your Giant Robot's color scheme.